James Forsyth

James Forsyth

James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.

Monday

James Forsyth

If Smith wants to get on with the job, she’ll have to face the press first

There are certain positions in government in which you can be hidden away, protected by your colleagues. Home Secretary isn’t one of them. Jacqui Smith has to work out how she is going to handle her return to public life. I’m sure there will be those advising her to carry on as if nothing had happened, to make an announcement on a serious subject and dare the press to question her about her husband’s viewing habits. But this would be a mistake. The press are going to ask her about this scandal pretty much regardless and for her to be questioned about porn movies after an announcement on anti-terrorism would just highlight why so many people think her position is untenable.

Sunday

James Forsyth

Governments can recover from rage but not ridicule

I doubt that even the Major government at its lowest ebb had a worse day of Sunday headlines than this government has had today. On a substantive level, Brown’s plans for the G20 appear in tatters. The Germans have leaked the draft communiqué and the New York Times has detailed Brown’s tendency to say one thing to a European audience and another to an American audience. There is also another story about Lord Myners’s tax affairs in the papers; Myners is fast becoming the personification of Brown’s foolish worship of the so-called masters of the universe. To round things off, the latest poll puts the Tories 13 points ahead. But I suspect it isn’t these broadsheet stories that will do most harm to the government.

Saturday

James Forsyth

The Wheeler turns in UKIP’s favour

The News of the World reports that Stuart Wheeler, the major Tory donor, has written a £100,000 cheque to UKIP and will vote for the party in the European elections. But this is not a straight forward defection. Wheeler says he will vote Tory in the local elections and at the general election. So, the party leadership must decide whether to expel Wheeler and refuse any future donations from him or to just ignore this provocation. Cameron, unlike previous Tory leaders, is dealing with Wheeler from a position of strength. The party is 13 points ahead in the latest poll and it is far easier for Cameron to brush this off on a day when the President of the United States has gone out of his way to arrange a meeting with him.

James Forsyth

The absurd demands of the NUT

The National Union of Teachers is the spiritual successor to the National Union of Mineworkers; a union representing an honest, decent profession but with a leadership that is committed to an extreme version of leftism. The Union’s latest pay demands are a case in point. The Daily Mail reports that: “Teachers want their days in the classroom cut to four a week – with a 10 per cent pay rise. The National Union of Teachers is planning a campaign for contractual rights to spend one day a week marking work and preparing lessons. It also wants a 35-hour limit on the working week.” Demanding a 10 pay cent pay rise across the board and a reduction in working hours would be a stretch at any time, but to do so in the midst of a recession is just ridiculous.

James Forsyth

Are things about to get worse for Brown?

Today is a bad day for Labour in the spin wars. The papers have settled for a generally mocking tone about the G20 and Gordon Brown’s effort to save the world. Note how The Times in its pre-summit write up points out how 'the ExCeL’s next big event is the British Pest Control Association conference.' (Personally, I’m more amused by the summit goody-bag containing a tea-towel). While The Times have got George Soros talking about whether or not Britain will need to be bailed out by the IMF, a discussion that is hardly likely to prompt confidence in the Prime Minister’s economic judgment. Worryingly for Brown, the press also seems ready to embark on another set of speculation about a leadership challenge to Brown this side of the election.

Friday

James Forsyth

Obama’s Afghan strategy wins neo-con plaudits

It has always been Barack Obama’s foreign policy instincts that have worried me most. I worried that he both did not grasp the security challenges facing the United States and that he was unwilling to expend the necessary political capital on foreign policy. Given these reservations, I was definitely encouraged by Obama’s announcement of Afghan / Pakistan strategy today. Rather than going for a purely counter-terrorism approach which would have failed in the medium-term, Obama has gone for a proper counter-insurgency approach. Bob Kagan, whose foreign policy instincts I respect, is most impressed: “Hats off to President Obama for making a gutsy and correct decision on Afghanistan.

James Forsyth

Purnell talks the left’s language

James Purnell’s speech to the ‘Progressive Governance’ conference in Chile is an interesting bit of political positioning. On the one hand, there’s a very Blairite argument that with the recession there is even more need for public sector reform, an acknowledgement that money is not the sole determinant of the quality of a service: “the years of rapidly expanding spending on public services are over. The continuous improvement to public services which we have seen for a decade now cannot stop. But more money will not be its motor force. We will be forced, by sheer weight of necessity, to get more for each pound. That means the debate about how to reinvent public services, how to improve outcomes through reform, is an urgent necessity.

James Forsyth

The rise of the Chinese banks

This FT graphic showing the world's biggest financial institutions by market cap from 1999 to 2009 is fascinating. In 1999, there were no Chinese banks in the top 20. Now, the top three positions are held by Chinese institutions and there are five of them in the top 20. In 1999, 11 of the 20 biggest institutions were American. Now, three are. Britain has gone from having four representatives--HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Barclays and NatWest--to having just one, HSBC. Obviously, 2009 is a low point for the Western financial sector and size isn't everything. Also, the Chinese financial sector has its own reckoning coming soon. But it'll be fascinating to see if this is a permanent shift or not.

James Forsyth

Osborne clamps down on public sector fat cats

There is an important policy announcement from George Osborne in his interview with The Sun today: “He also declared war on public servant fat cats. None will earn more than the PM’s £190,000-a-year.” This is both good politics and good policy. It will strike a chord with a public that is increasingly angry and frustrated at the excesses of the public sector boss class. And, really, can any CoffeeHousers explain why the chief executive of the Carbon Trust has to be paid £262,350 a year? One of the great scandals of Labour’s period in power is how public sector managers are now getting paid private sector salaries but still receiving public sector levels of benefits, job security and working conditions.

James Forsyth

Hannan passes the million mark

Daniel Hannan’s evisceration of Gordon Brown has now passed the one million mark on YouTube and the mainstream media is now covering it. Mission accomplished for the right side of the blogosphere.

James Forsyth

Hope over expectations management

Martin Kettle and Steve Richards devote their columns today to the question of why Gordon Brown has so hyped the G20 Summit that it cannot possibly live up to expectations. Kettle sums it up nicely, when he writes that: “He has set expectations too high. His rhetoric left reality standing. From the moment the summit was mooted, Brown bet the whole farm on the rewards of being seen at the heart of the economic summit. As a result, Thursday's gathering has been seriously oversold as a transformative political event. The danger for Brown is that now, instead of being hailed as the man who led the global economy out of recession, he risks being dismissed as boastful but ineffectual.” Steve compares this error to the election that never was.

Thursday

James Forsyth

The Iran two-step

Bob Kagan, one of the smartest foreign policy thinkers around, points out why Obama’s attempts to reach out to Iran are, from a hawkish perspective, sensible: “So one of two things is going to happen: Either the friendly diplomatic approach works, and the Iranians actually cave and accept American and European demands, which would be good. Or the friendly approach doesn’t work, and the Iranians proceed on their present course, thus proving that even diplomacy sincerely pursued by a well-intentioned president has no impact on Tehran’s calculations. I honestly can’t see the harm in the Obama administration’s efforts. I hope they succeed.

James Forsyth

Even the left is beginning to abandon the idea of change from above

Soundings, the left-wing journal, has just released a book entitled The Crash: A  view from the left (you can download it for free here). Edited by Jon Cruddas and Jon Rutherford, it is—as the title suggests—an explicitly left-wing take on recent events. Unsurprisingly, I don’t agree with the book’s economics. Its contributors don’t see that the economic consensus in Britain was sadly not pro-market, but pro-corporate—a different thing entirely. But what should interest Coffee Housers, is how even the left is moving away from top-down solutions. In their introduction, Cruddas and Rutherford call for a “socialism of equality, freedom and solidarity – not dictated by the few from above, but made by the many from below.

James Forsyth

A very public courtship dance

A few weeks ago, Allegra Stratton put the cat among the Labour pigeons when she blogged that Jon Cruddas and James Purnell might team up to run for the leadership. At the time, some dismissed the idea out of hand. The nay-sayers argued that the ideological differences between Cruddas and Purnell are simply too large; Cruddas takes his inspiration from the first phase of Blairism and Purnell from its final period. But I’ve always thought an alliance was a distinct possibility. Both men know that their factions aren’t big enough to deliver the leadership on their own. Another factor pushing Cruddas and Purnell together is that the other leadership options are so dire for Labour. Harriet Harman’s brand of cultural leftism is hardly what the country is crying out for.

James Forsyth

An extreme error

Last night Charles Farr, a civil servant who coordinates the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, delivered the Colin Cramphorn memorial lecture. Farr was expounding on and defending the recently released edition of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy. Listening to Farr, one was struck by how the government still can’t properly grasp that terrorism is merely a symptom of a wider problem, the hold of extremist Islamism on a small but significant section of the British population. Frustratingly, there have times when the government seemed ready to grasp this nettle. After 7/7, Blair declared: “We will start to beat this when we stand up and confront the ideology of this evil. Not just the methods but the ideas”.

James Forsyth

Stat of the day

The FT’s Westminster blog flags up this quite astonishing statistic: ‘The FT’s resident economics guru Chris Giles has a flabbergasting explanation of the scale of the debt the government is raising in the next two years: £350bn. “That is more debt bequeathed to its successor than the total borrowed by successive rulers and governments of Britain between 1691 and 1997, the year Labour was elected.”’ Normally, Prime Ministers who do not lead their party to an election victory and serve only part of a Parliament are mere footnotes in history. Brown will avoid that fate. But he will go down in history as one of the worst Prime Ministers this country has had since the second Reform Act.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

One pledge that David Cameron can, and should, make on tax

The state of the public finances means that it is going to be very hard—if not impossible—for the Tories, if elected, to cut taxes during their first term. But it is important that the electorate, and the base of the party, still know that the Tories believe in the benefits of low-taxation. One easy and eye-catching way for David Cameron to signal this would be for him to declare that he’ll freeze the salaries and allowances of the Prime Minister, Ministers and MPs until the government can cut taxes overall.

James Forsyth

Can the Internet turn Dan Hannan’s skewering of Brown into a story?

Dan Hannan’s speech yesterday was magnificent, in three and a half minutes he absolutely eviscerated Gordon Brown. Unsurprisingly, the speech received little attention on the broadcast news—Tory MEP attacks Labour Prime Minister is a dog bites man story. But the speech has already has more than twenty-five thousand views on YouTube, Downing Street’s video of Brown’s address has had only 219 views. If Hannan's speech was to become an internet sensation, hitting, say, the million views mark, then the media would be likely to cover that as a story in and of itself.  P.S. The Vote Different video has had more than five and a half million views.

James Forsyth

Hemmed in

Gordon Brown is now hemmed in. Both the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England have now indicated that they would rather walk than go along with a full scorched earth policy. The Prime Minister must know that the resignation of either man would destroy him so we can be confident that Brown will not be able to wreak irreparable damage on the public finances before he leaves office. There have been precious few pieces of good economic news recently. But the fact that there is now a check to Brown’s actions is deeply reassuring. P.S. Sadly, there’ll be no chance for Brown to be questioned about King’s comments in the House because he’s dashing to New York ‘to save the world’ before heading to Chile for a leftist love-in.

James Forsyth

A shameful lead

The Guardian’s editorial on the government’s decision to break off relations with the Muslim Council of Britain over the views of Daud Abdullah, its deputy secretary-general, contains this quite remarkable passage: “the government's chief quarrel is with the hypothetical suggestion that resistance would be appropriate if UK forces were ever used to intercept arms destined for Gaza. Very many Muslims, and indeed many non-Muslims, would agree with that” So, The Guardian believes that there is nothing inherently wrong or unreasonable with believing that it is justified to use violence against British forces attempting to prevent the shipment of arms to a genocidal terrorist organisation. This is as incredible as it is shameful.